


archie 2

by romanticalgirl



Series: December Ficlets 2007 [25]
Category: Hornblower (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-07 20:47:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romanticalgirl/pseuds/romanticalgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Originally posted 12-05-07</p>
    </blockquote>





	archie 2

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 12-05-07

He comes aboard at twelve, the younger son of someone worth little more than most, but distantly related to someone with title enough to earn him a spot on a ship as a midshipman, bought and paid for like a slave with better living conditions and worse working ones. Archie smiles at the thought – he’s altogether too smart for his own good and he’s been told time and again that his mouth will some day be his ruination – but he knows full well he’s to put in nothing more than hard labor with a fancy enough uniform.

The other men treat him well enough, though some are old enough to be his father and some even older still, but they treat him as something of an equal once he learns the ropes, both literally and figuratively. He’s never particularly yearned for the sea, but he knows there is little use for him on land and here at least he can serve in some capacity, make his life worth something more than the second son of a second son of a distant relative of someone of great import. Here he is useful and something about the sea air makes him feel alive in a way he’s not sure he’s ever been, save for when he breathed in the dust of the theater, sitting beside his mother and staring enraptured at the lit stage.

He holds on to those things in the fetid air of the hold, smelling of rotted meat and dead rats, salt and brine and the stink of rum. It stinks to high heaven and he wrinkles his nose, searching for the lantern oil he’s been sent to fetch when he sees the movement from the corner of his eye. He doesn’t breathe as the man – it is a man, his mind tells his frantically racing heart, nothing more than a man – stands and lumbers toward him, sick with the smell of bile and booze and other things Archie doesn’t know to identify. 

“Wha’sis?” He pokes Archie hard in the chest, jabbing him with a slim but rough finger. “’Oo the ‘ell are you?”

“Kennedy, sir.” He recognizes the uniform, the same as his only stretched over an older man, just as thin as Clayton, but there’s something dark in his eyes, something Archie had seen once in the eyes of a village boy he’d caught slaughtering a dog just to see him bleed. “Archie Kennedy.”

“Archie Kennedy.” The man leans in, drunk as Archie’s brother had been the night before Archie had left, sick on his own shoes and his mother’s best linens from wine and whatever else he’d taken from the bar when everyone else had been too engrossed in sending Archie off to this adventure. To this. “Aren’t you a pretty one.”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“But you do. You know. All the pretty ones know.” He reaches out and catches Archie’s chin in a deceptively light grip. “My name is Jack Simpson. You ‘eard of me?”

“N-no, sir.” 

“Never ‘eard my name?” Jack leans in and the smell is overpowering, overwhelming. Archie swallows hard against the instinctive reflex to gag at the smell, just now identifying the lingering scent of death, of raw meat on his breath. Jack looks down at the lantern oil in Archie’s hand and smiles, stealing it from his grip and snaking other hand to behind Archie’s neck, propelling him forward, slamming him hard into a pile of burlap bags filled with beans. “That’ll change, Archie, m’boy. Going to make sure my name is one you’ll never forget.”


End file.
